Blog – Drawing Words Writing Pictureshttp://dw-wp.com
Jessica Abel and Matt Madden on reading, teaching, and making comicsMon, 16 Feb 2015 12:28:11 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6322075454 ways to teach 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Stylehttp://dw-wp.com/2015/02/4-ways-to-teach-99x/
http://dw-wp.com/2015/02/4-ways-to-teach-99x/#commentsSat, 14 Feb 2015 15:31:20 +0000http://dw-wp.com/?p=8558Before writing DW&WP and Mastering Comics with Jessica, Matt made a book called 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style in which he told the same one-page anecdote in 99 different ways including different points of view, different genres, homages to famous artists, and many formal games which explore the many possibilities available to storytellers of all sorts.

Since the book came out in 2005 it has been used in all kinds of classrooms around the world and Matt has taught with it regularly in his class and workshops. Recently a fellow teacher asked him if he would share some of the activities he has done with “99X” so he put together a long and heavily-illustrated post about it over on his personal blog.

Keith Haring-style version by a student at Alberta College of Art + Design

To give you a small preview, here are the four approaches Matt talks about:

I. Further variations on the 99X templateII. Make your own templateIII. Build an extended projectIV. Activities for non-artists

You can read the full post here. Have you taught with 99X? We’d love to hear from you about it here or at Matt’s blog.

You can purchase the US edition of Matt’s book here. There are also UK, French, Spanish, Flemish, Italian (out of print) and Japanese versions available and Matt’s always searching for new audiences. In addition, you can find the whole work being serialized online in German and Hungarian.

]]>http://dw-wp.com/2015/02/4-ways-to-teach-99x/feed/18558Best American Comics: The Notable Comics of 2014http://dw-wp.com/2014/10/notable-comics-2014/
http://dw-wp.com/2014/10/notable-comics-2014/#respondTue, 14 Oct 2014 09:26:49 +0000http://dw-wp.com/?p=8552Many of you know that up until last year Jessica and Matt were series editors of the Best American Comics series at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. When they moved to France at the end of 2012, they handed the reins over to the most capable and devoted person they could think of: curator, publisher, and critic Bill Kartalopoulos. The first volume under his watch has just come out with guest editor Scott McCloud (Jessica and Matt were jealous not to get a chance to work on this one!) and it’s getting fantasticreviews.

Bill has decided to keep up a tradition we started which is to list online and link to as many of the “notable comics” as possible. These are the hundred or so books, stories, strips, or webcomics that we series editors preselected but which didn’t make it into the final cut. You are guaranteed to find a treasure trove of comics every bit as rich as what you’ll find in the table of contents in this section of the book.

This spring, I taught comics to an 11th grade studio art class at LOMA, a public art high school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The students had already been taught life drawing, bookbinding, paper-making, and more. I based the lessons on insights about the students from the class teacher, Julie Roinos, which kept me from feeling as though I was walking blindly into the classroom dynamic.

I started the first class of each week with a presentation on some element of comics before diving into an assignment. Each week was comprised of two two-hour classes and one one-hour class. I tried to imbue each talk with a bit of comics history, as well as work by some contemporary greats.

Week 1

The first talk was on the basic elements and working definitions of comics. The students were not interested in hearing much about history and terminology. Not surprising. I presented a smattering of comics pages, including Lilli Carré, Hergé, Jaime Hernandez, and Eiichiro Oda.

Next, I presented a slideshow of gag cartoons by B. Kliban, Zachary Kanin, Brad Neely, and more. I threw an internet “meme” image in there to show that yes, those funny images with text are just like cartoons. The form is malleable.

Before we began making cartoons, I had all of the students take part in a New Yorker-style caption contest. They had mostly worked in more formal and craft-based visual art, so I think this exercise helped them loosen up and ease into working narratively with text and images.

The first assignment was to create a one-panel cartoon. I had shown them examples of different types of text-image interplay and humor to give them some background, but it took some students a while to develop an idea they liked.

I had planned to have them work on cartoons some more the next day, but decided to have them create two-panel comics about high school instead. This exercise puts the focus on simple panel transitions and mixing up compositions. The group discussion that followed helped bring these concepts home for the students who struggled with it. I highly recommend this assignment! Making your first full page of comics can be daunting. Simplifying it into two-panel chunks can help. Give it a simple theme, like Before and After.

Week 2

For this talk, I focused more on specific choices that comics creators are faced with, like panel transitions and choice of moment. I referred to Scott McCloud a bit here, and showed pages by Mike Mignola, Taiyo Matsumoto, Milo Manara, and Shaun Tan. I then talked a bit about early comics like The Yellow Kid and the work of Rodolphe Toepffer. I made this talk shorter, about twenty minutes, since the students reacted better to interactive activities than lectures.

Taking a tip from this post on DW-WP by Derek Mainhart, I asked the students to decode the narrative of a few “protocomics”, including The Last Judgment of Hu-Nefer, and Masaccio’s Tribute Money. I did so in a style similar to Visual Thinking Strategies, wherein I asked questions designed to get the students to arrive at their own explanations. I would recommend this exercise as a way of getting students to think about narrative in visual art and how it relates to comics. I think it would be helpful for any student of visual culture in general.

Next, we made a foldy mini-comic as in this post, combining it with the story card exercise from Appendix C of Drawing Words & Writing Pictures. Each student was given a card for their character’s occupation, personality, physical attribute, and story spark (e.g., “doctor”, “sad”, “bald”, and “vacation”). I highly recommend using story cards for students’ first full-page comic. Even the students who found these constraints stifling at first were inventive with their stories. Some students even asked for me to give them story cards for the next assignment.

The teacher suggested having them work in pairs, which some did, while others split up because they were excited about their own ideas. I encouraged them to draw out their character on a separate sheet first, which a few did, though a couple perfectionists got stuck on the character and redrew it over and over. Most students did a nice job with comics timing and utilizing the layout. I had them draw in pencil or ink on copy paper, no thumbnails or preliminary pencils, to get them into the habit of making things without getting too precious with them.

The sentiment I reiterated here was that this was probably not the last thing they would ever make, so getting overly tight or fearful was a waste of energy.

Week 3

Talk: Rhythm & Flow, EmanataAssignment: One-Page Comic

I spoke to the students about panel flow, going into more detail about how panels add up to a page and good practices for placing text. A couple of the students insisted on a live reading of a Jaime Hernandez page, which was fun and made them think more about how text and expressions function in comics.

I also talked a bit about emanata, and asked students to pick some out in pages from Peanuts and One Piece. I think the rhythm and flow stuff may have been a bit too much too soon, but speaking concretely about emanata seemed helpful; a lot of students started using it in their work.

Each student created a one-page comic on Bristol paper about mutations (no Transformers or Ninja Turtles, I said!). This theme works well (especially with teens) because physical transformation is easy to visualize sequentially. I left the process up to the students, but encouraged them to stick with a six-panel grid. The end products were great overall, though many struggled with composition and repeating poses.

Week 4

I figured they were all pretty tired of hearing me talk at this point, so for this presentation, I showed a slideshow of lots of very different comics pages, including work by James Kochalka, Chris Ware, and Ron Regé Jr. I had the students dissect pages by David Mazzucchelli and Connor Willumsen, specifically asking questions about the way the text interacted with the images.

The final project was for each student to create a two-page comic for inclusion in a class anthology. I asked them for the theme this time, eventually settling on dreams. I had them thumbnail and pencil these ones first, offering notes and revisions on each phase. Most teens are not crazy about planning, but I think they were able to see how the process improved the final product.

Week 5

Assignment: Inking the Two-Page Comic

I skipped the talk entirely for the final week. Most students chose to ink with Microns, though I encouraged them to use nibs and brushes. Some struggled with page proportions, despite me showing them the diagonal trick. Some kind of template might be good in the future. The final inked pages were really great, with a good number of pleasant surprises. I collected and printed everyone’s comics together in an anthology zine and gave them all a copy.

I think they really loved having this kind of physical collection of their work. The resulting anthology was excellent, full of mark-making and storytelling choices that came from unique perspectives. We went through the anthology together and discussed what worked and what could use improvement in each piece, which hopefully left them with food for thought. Scroll to the bottom to see some of the final work!

Reflection

It was difficult to engage the students in the presentations, but they took to making comics fairly quickly. If I taught the class again, I might focus more on having them make lots of small things, to better push them through the various sticking points we came across, and spend less time on the talks. Breaking up the time and giving them lots of small deadlines is always good. On the other hand, if I had the same group of students again, I would absolutely push them to make their own mini-comics. They are ready.

I think the thing that really ignited the students’ imagination was the realization that comics are more than a craft, they are a way to tell their own story. They are not just answering questions on a test, or writing a form essay; they can say whatever they want, however they want (within reason, of course). And that’s powerful.

In terms of trends, the kids were all very accepting of each other, super into anime, and kind of lazy at times. I told them about how hard their favorite manga-ka work, often sleeping three hours a night and only taking breaks to eat. My hope is that they apply their new understanding of personal narrative and visual culture to their chosen path, and maybe even continue creating comics.

]]>http://dw-wp.com/2014/07/jess-worby-5week-teen-comics/feed/28532Guest Post: Paulo Patricio on how to make a panel grid in five minuteshttp://dw-wp.com/2014/03/5min-grid/
http://dw-wp.com/2014/03/5min-grid/#commentsWed, 12 Mar 2014 15:37:38 +0000http://dw-wp.com/?p=8518Our longtime friend and collaborator Paulo Patrício is an illustrator and cartoonist born in Angola and currently living in Portugal. Among his many projects, one that will be of particular interest to visitors to this blog is Quotesoncomics.com, an ever- growing collection of quotes about comics (also on Tumblr). Check his blog for more pictures and updates.

It happens a lot of times, in workshops or looking at cartoonist friends with whom I have worked, paying attention to how they draw a panel grid. And sometimes, I am completely baffled with the time and complexity they invest in such a task. Drawing line after line, with this ruler and that ruler. Sometimes they even do it on the computer, print it out and trace it using a light table, or they just quit and buy on of those ready-to-use layout pages.

While this is a simplified version, I will explain a very quick and effective method to generate grids. What you need: X-Acto, soft pencil, a triangle and a hard sheet of cardboard the same size as your page. On the cardboard, draw a grid with the margins, dimensions and number of panels you need. In this example, I used 6. After drawing the grid, pick the X-Acto and cut out the interior of each panel. Place the cardboard mask on top of your page, align, and with the pencil draw the panels.

Notice that I used a 6 panel grid, but that can change from page to page, and you can easily come up with variations. You just need to merge the panels, either horizontal or vertically.

You can also do it on several pages at once, up to 100 or so. You just need an unexpected, but very handy, tool. I will explain that in another post.

Here’s a gift idea for you friends/relatives/encouragers/enablers out there: a beginning cartoonist’s starter kit!

To get your special person started in comics, just use the following checklist to buy him or her the basic tools of the trade:

Drawing Words & Writing Pictures will explain how to use all of this stuff! You can buy the book online or check your local bookseller.

Download your gift shopping checklist here and take it to your local art supply store (in fact, a well-stocked office supply store will carry a lot of this stuff). There are also plenty of places you can order these supplies online, for example Pearl Paint or Dick Blick.

To keep things simple, we’ve done all the work to find shopping links for you in our Supplies section under our Resources tab. You’ll also find details, including illustrations and descriptions.

As you may know, Matt and I have been the series editors for the Best American Comics (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) for the past six years. That means that, every year, we tried to get our hands on every comic published by a North American cartoonist (which is the USA, Canada, and Mexico), or anyone who makes his or her home here, and then read them all to sort out the best 100 or so comics of the year. (Of course, we couldn’t possibly see everything, but we tried.) These best 100-120, we then handed on to the year’s guest editor, who picks his or her favorite 25-30, which go into that year’s volume. Then, Matt and I got to make our list of everything else we think comics readers should have read that year. It’s called the Notable Comics list, and it comprises virtually all the comics we sent to the guest editor that weren’t picked, as well as a number of others that we think are noteworthy for various reasons, but that we didn’t send to the guest editor.

Over the six volumes we’ve edited, we’ve tried to shine a spotlight on this list. As most guest editors point out in their introductions, the selection process, when it gets down to which stories make the cutoff for the volume and which don’t, can be alarmingly arbitrary. Often, we and the guest editors would love to include 50 stories in the published volume, but there just isn’t room. But when you combine the notable list with the stories that are printed, it might be a little more possible to talk about representing what’s we actually think is best in a given year. Also, when looking for good comics to read, why limit yourself? We’ve always hoped readers will delve a bit into the list to find more great stories once they finish reading BAC.

Below, we’ve reprinted the full list of the Notables from the 2013 volume, which was guest-edited by Jeff Smith. We’ve also added extensive links and images of the covers to intrigue you and to help you track the works down.

You may have noticed the use of past tense in the preceding paragraphs. Matt and I have stepped down as series editors as of the 2013 volume. It was a fabulous run, but time to do something else with our lives! We wish the best of luck to new series editor Bill Kartalopoulos, and hope maybe he’ll want to run his Notables here next year.

]]>http://dw-wp.com/2013/10/notables-2013/feed/68342Best American Comics 2013 Table of Contentshttp://dw-wp.com/2013/07/best-american-comics-2013-table-of-contents/
http://dw-wp.com/2013/07/best-american-comics-2013-table-of-contents/#respondMon, 08 Jul 2013 14:17:01 +0000http://dw-wp.com/?p=8368Every year, we get requests from teachers wanting to know what will be in the new Best American Comics before it comes out, so as to plan their classes. Herewith, therefore, is the table of contents of the next Best American Comics, edited by Jeff Smith, and with a fantastic cover by Kate Beaton, and out in September of this year.

vii : Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, Foreword

xiii : Jeff Smith, Introduction

1 : Alison Bechdel, “Mirror” (Excerpt) from Are You My Mother?

26 : Brandon Graham, “The Speaker” from Dark Horse Presents

35 : Jesse Jacobs, “The Divine Manifestation of a Singular Impulse” from By This Shall You Know Him

]]>http://dw-wp.com/2013/07/best-american-comics-2013-table-of-contents/feed/08368Haiku comicshttp://dw-wp.com/2013/06/haiku-comics/
http://dw-wp.com/2013/06/haiku-comics/#commentsThu, 13 Jun 2013 21:02:35 +0000http://dw-wp.com/?p=8318I recently taught a workshop to comics Master’s students at the École Européene Supérieure de l’Image in Angoulême, France. The subject of the four-day workshop was comics based on fixed forms borrowed from poetry such as the sestina, the villanelle, or the sonnet. (This is a subject I’ve dabbled in a fair amount in my personal work.)

One form of poetry I have not previously played around with is the haiku. Its brevity and relative simplicity of rules made it a good candidate for a warm-up activity. So after reviewing the traditional rules and reading a few examples in French and English, I had the students spend half an hour or so coming up with quick, thumbnailed “haiku comics”.

Before starting we looked at a few examples of haiku comics that already exist to see what ways the form has been adapted to our medium. One of the things I find interesting about the 5-7-5 syllable structure is that there are a number of ways to think about how that might translate to comics. From a teaching point of view, that was the most productive aspect of the exercise: engaging students with the subtle forces of layout, panel size, composition, and rhythm.

Here are two very different haiku comics I found online. The first is by John Porcellino and you might describe it as evoking a haiku rather than adapting it faithfully: the sizes of the three panels seem to refer to the 5-7-5 structure, and the text, though not observing the syllabic rules, observe many other principles of the haiku: the present tense, a reference to nature, the obersvation of a fleeting moment. One student pointed out that the framing meta-panel could be seen as uniting the comic in a single, cosmic instant.

The second example is a webcomic by Mysh called Imaginary Encounters which uses the haiku has a base structure for a series of autobiographical one-page stories. The page I want to talk about is a little NSFW so we have removed it from this post to keep dw-wp.com all ages. (You can find the page on my personal website, or, of course in the web archive of Mysh’s strip.) In this case, the text is a fairly orthodox haiku: “On the first sunrise/we observe the newborn world/from the mountain top” (even if the subject matter, a dreamy gay travelogue, is far from traditional!) but the comics page seems to mainly echo the three line structure in the form of three equally-sized tiers. One thing I particularly like about this example is the ironic counterpoint between the phrase “mountain top”, a fairly classic nature reference, and the image of two lovers looking out from their “mountain,” the top-floor of window of a building. In another odd touch, we see that the place where they are is utterly flooded.

We discussed other ways the syllable structure might be adapted, generally agreeing that Porcellino’s relative size approach worked well. As a counter-example: we all agreed that though a three-page comic of 5 panels, 7 panels, 5 panels would be feasible it would be too long and against the spirit of a haiku. We left it up to each student to decide which aspects of haiku to adapt and which to disregard.

some ways to conceive of a comics haiku

When everyone was done we stuck them on the wall (or projected on the screen: more and more students are working purely digitally) and talked about them a bit.

I also made a few attempts myself. In the first one I tried to write a traditional haiku, referencing the present, a season, a moment in time, and so on (it was easy to think about nature and the seasons because it’s been a long, gray spring here and in most of France). That said, I couldn’t help put a modern, pop culture twist to it, since I was drawing all this in spitting distance of the Musée de la Bande Dessinée, which has a statue of Hugo Pratt‘s Corto Maltese keeping watch along the footbridge across the Charente river:

You can see that I used the 5-7-5 relative panel height principle here, cutting the space from top to bottom as the eye descends. For the second comic, I flipped it sideways, thinking that was a more natural movement for the gaze of the haiku poet, surveying the landscape around her. An unusual aspect of this art school is that it is located on a small island right on the Charente, so when you step out, as I did, to the coffee machine, you find yourself surrounded by rushing water on all sides. It is, in fact, about as haiku-inspring a moment as you are likely to find in the middle of a city. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to translate the syllable count in to drawn lines, so in this second version I drew five lines in the first panel, seven in the second, and five again in the last. I stood in the middle of the river and looked first to my left, then straight ahead, then right:

You may have noticed that I also used the words left, center, and right, in the three lines of text. The crane referred to and minimally evoked in the drawing is a construction crane over a new student center being built across the river. Of course, the association with the bird is intentional. What’s interesting is that my student Lise did the same play with “grue” (above), which as in English refers to both the bird and the construction equipment.

I drew both of these comics quickly, without pencilling or much planning, with a fountain pen on letter size (A4) paper. I had in mind an interesting detail I came across which is that a haiku is intended to be read in one breath: how can we translate that idea to drawing or looking at drawings?

After I scanned the pages, though, I had the idea that the second one might work better with a less rigid panel height, something more organic and evocative, again, of the haiku’s syllable structure:

I encourage teachers out there to give this exercise a try and adapt it as you see fit. It’s quick and it doesn’t require a lot of set-up or a lot of drawing skill.

]]>http://dw-wp.com/2013/06/haiku-comics/feed/28318Mastering Comics is up for an Eisner awardhttp://dw-wp.com/2013/06/mastering-comics-is-up-for-an-eisner-award/
http://dw-wp.com/2013/06/mastering-comics-is-up-for-an-eisner-award/#respondTue, 04 Jun 2013 16:05:24 +0000http://dw-wp.com/?p=8332The Eisner Award nominations were announced a month or so ago, and it is a really strong list this year. I say that both because and despite the fact that Mastering Comics is nominated in the “Best Comics-Related Book” category. It is truly an honor to be nominated, especially in this company. Our thanks go to the selection committee.

That said, we would be extra-honored to actually win that Eisner! If you are involved professionally in the comics world, as a creator, a retailer, a writer, or a publisher, you are eligible to vote in the Eisners, and we humbly ask for your vote. Mastering Comics is in category 27, on the last page of voting. If you don’t have an opinion about a given category, you can skip it, and you can write in candidates in any category.

]]>http://dw-wp.com/2013/06/mastering-comics-is-up-for-an-eisner-award/feed/08332Teaching Comics to teens week 2 day 5: Yellow Feverhttp://dw-wp.com/2013/04/teaching-teens-day-3-week-5-yellow-fever/
http://dw-wp.com/2013/04/teaching-teens-day-3-week-5-yellow-fever/#respondTue, 02 Apr 2013 20:36:38 +0000http://dw-wp.com/?p=8296This is part of a series of posts by Derek Mainhart—an entire year‘s curriculum for a comics class at the secondary level: middle school and high school. Follow us via rss, Facebook, or Twitter (buttons above to the right) to be informed when new posts go up. To search for all the posts by Derek, including all in this series, click here.

It’s Friday! You know what that means: Cartoon History!As I said earlier, I think it’s an important, oft-neglected subject. It’s also a nice way to end the week, and provides a nice rhythm to the semester. And yes, history is fun.

Objective: Exploring the history of Cartooning

Do Now: Who do you think the FIRST famous cartoon character was? When do you think it was created?

Activities:

Brief discussion based on the Do Now

It’s always interesting to experience students’ gauge on history. A not infrequent answer is something along the lines of “Mickey Mouse in the 1960’s”.

Teacher will introduce The Yellow Kid and Richard F. Outcault using hand-out accompanied by visual examples.

The Information Age is a wonderful thing. There are any number of terrific resources with which to gather material. Some of my favorites are listed below under Resources. (Old-fashioned as I am, many of them are books. Giant, musty books.)

I start with The Yellow Kid simply because most Cartooning Histories use him as a convenient starting point, coming as he does near the dawn of the 20th century. This approach has merit, though it is certainly debatable (as we’ll see below). Your presentation method is up to you. As I’ve said before, I use Smartboard. Some major points you may want to address in your discussion:

Outcault’s career took off when he was hired by Joseph Pulitzer to work on the New York World. Teacher will elicit responses to gauge students’ prior knowledge. Who was Joseph Pulitzer? Where have you heard the name “Pulitzer” before?

Outcault’s feature, titled Hogan’s Alley, took place in a crowded, urban slum. How does this reflect to the early twentieth century in America?

The Yellow Kid’s name was Mickey Dugan. What is a stereotype? (Note some of the different portrayals of ethnicity.) Are images like this offensive? Why were they acceptable back then? Are there stereotypes today?

Readers recognized Mickey because he always wore the same yellow nightshirt. What other cartoon characters always dress the same way? Sets a precedent.

What are the words on his shirt? His dialogue. Why are they there? This is before the invention of the word balloon.

What else is odd about his dialogue? Outcault used the street slang of his era.

Hogan’s Alley reflected its era, from the everyday (football game)-

to major events like the Spanish-American War.

Speaking of which, what helped to fuel U.S. involvement in the war? What is “yellow journalism”? The term was coined due to the immense popularity of The Yellow Kid. His presence drove up sales as readers would buy the New York World to see what he was up to.

Outcault was eventually hired away by William Randolph Hearst. Who was he? Outcault began producing Hogan’s Alley for Hearst’s New York Journal. Pulitzer meanwhile hired another artist, George Luks, to continue drawing the feature for the New York World. There were no copyright laws regarding comics at the time.

The Yellow Kid was so popular that he became the first comics character to be heavily merchandised, from toys:

to sheet music (this was before radio):

to advertising:

Is Hogan’s Alley truly a comic strip? No word balloons, no panels, not sequential. It’s closer to our current project, Gag Cartoons, but it’s not quite that either. Then why are we studying it? The Yellow Kid is the first character created by a cartoonist to appear regularly in a newspaper, become widely recognized by the public, and cross over into popular culture.

Exercise:The Yellow Kid achieved fame around the turn of the twentieth century. Students will create a Yellow Kid for the early twenty-first century. Here are some examples:

Here he is, flummoxed by modernity… Here, all ‘gangsta’ as the kids say… And here, with lobster claws for some reason.

There was also Don Markstein’s excellent Toonopedia website, but I haven’t been able to access it since Mr. Markstein sadly passed last year. If anyone has any information on this, it would be greatly appreciated.

Self-Assessment:

So this week you:

Introduced the concept of Gag Cartoons

Helped students generate ideas through warm-up exercises

Guided their ideas through individual discussion

Expanded the possibilities of the subject with the concept of the Anti-gag cartoon

Derek Mainhart is an art teacher at Deer Park High School and at the Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. He has taught widely at many institutions such as Molloy College, Boricua College and Hofstra, among others. He teaches cartooning workshops in the greater New York area. In addition, he was the first Vice President of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) in Manhattan, and was instrumental in the formation of its annual MoCCA Art Festival. He has organized and participated in numerous gallery exhibits in and around NYC. His self-published works include The Iraqi Tinies and W. He is married to web-cartoonist and fellow art teacher Ali Solomon. They live with their daughter in Forest Hills (not far from the house where Peter Parker grew up.)